In this episode, Teri-Denise and Brendon return for the final installment of Vamp and dissect the complex themes presented in Nosferatu directed by Robert Eggers. They analyze the film's unique stylistic choices and its commentary on masculinity, power dynamics, and the role of women in these narratives. They also navigate the historical contexts that inform these stories, weaving together threads of horror, mythology, and societal critique, ultimately questioning the nature of evil and redemption. The discussion goes on to highlight the evolution of horror cinema and the cultural motifs that shape our understanding of these timeless creatures.

Mentioned In This Series:

Website: Nosferatu (2024)

Website: Nosferatu (1922)

Website: Dracula (1992)

Website: Dracula 2000 (2000)

Website: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001)

Hello there.

This is Terry Denise, a Lansing Community College student and your host of Ripper in LCC Connect podcast where I interview others and ask about their unique efforts and connections in around and beyond the community of Michigan's capital city. Vamp3 Part three. Hey, this.

Now it's part three.

Now it's part three. We have been talking about Nosferatu and vampires in general in Dracula. This is Terry Denise along with Brendan. Hi, Brendan.

Hi.

We're on a blood sucking campaign right now, basically. Right.

So I believe last we were speaking on how Abrahamic religious figures had interspersed and evolved into different kinds of Dracula stories that we've seen displayed on screen. There was a Dracula movie, I remember, where it wasn't Jesus, it was the Judas. Judas Iscariot was in one of these films.

It was Judas Iscariot became the first vampire. So it was his quest to do whatever he needed to do in that film.

It was like when he got the silver, he went to go hang himself and he was given an ability to come back alive. I believe that's what the.

Or it was maybe it was even that he couldn't even die or something where that became his consequence for turning his back on Jesus for silver. Eternal damnation, eternal life, but through another way.

But in with that though, you've got these stories about, you know, people take the sacrament all the time, which is of the blood, blood is the life once again. And the flesh being of the body of Christ, which is very interesting.

And then you put that into like the realm of vampires and it makes for good entertainment. It might be, I don't know, for some that's not such a good thing.

But I think that's a great area for a lot of writers to take their own way of turning those stories into each other. You start to run out of ideas after a while. You can only stake so many stuff, so many undead beings. And you gotta have some new ways.

Of stake so many hearts.

Yeah, you gotta have some new ways of looking at this stuff. So Count Warlock of Robert Eggers version. And I believe that was through a 24. Right. The studios.

I believe so.

Okay. You see a very specific style in how he creates. He's got a lot of slow moving pacings, a lot of the camera movements.

It's not even though that they're so slow, it's just that sometimes they're just slightly off. Things are slightly askewed. In a very beautiful way though, it's not so weird that it makes you like, this is a horror film.

We've got Our Dutch angles over here and, you know, everybody's running everywhere. It's like, nope, nope, nope. It's actually the opposite of that, where you do get those fast turns every once in a while.

But he uses them sparingly, purposefully, definitely very subtle.

He's got a light touch.

So when we do see in this film where we have the story of this cop Cossack soldier who sold.

Or if you kind of like Judas Iscariot in that other Dracula movie where he is given this option or he goes for himself to become this supernatural creature that after being a soldier, he's just like, I still want blood. I still want more. Even after death. So that's kind of basically his storyline. The Cossacks were around the region of Russia.

Yeah. It was like in the Ukrainian steppes.

Yeah, exactly. Eastern Christian people. East Slavic.

East meets West.

Right.

And you can see that even in the costuming and in the hair design, the hairdressing and the makeup, you see that it is an old Cossack soldier in the hat and even in the facial hair, which we saw a lot of, which for some, I guess, was a controversial thing with the mustache, which I thought the mustache look great. I thought the blood coming off of the mustache was especially amazing. The effects that they did with that.

But what we're seeing is an undead creature. So this isn't a human. This isn't just a soldier of that time or anything.

This is this re emerging being that used to look like something else that kind of looks similar to what we see in the film. But this is just its dead version of itself. And you see all these, like, holes in its skin. You see all of this, like, all these warped areas.

And you see this parted hair that's stringy and disgusting looking. You see the skin is, like, falling off, but you also get this weird mustache. But I guess at the time.

Brendan, if you can, you have some information on facial hair. A lot during the time of plague. And it wasn't just for stylistic, like, cosmetic.

As internal medicine started to become more of a known thing, especially like contamination and how germs spread, that was like a big thing that changed with dressing patterns and, like, you know, fashion styles. You know, facial hair just kind of started to go out of.

Out of fashion because, you know, we started to understand how it was, you know, harbingers for disease. The whole Victorian mindset of, you know, everything proper in its place.

There's a status quo to things, you know, a natural order that you have to adhere to.

But there's an Element of not necessarily being chaste, but it's almost ignoring the fact that our bodies sweat and produce chemicals and that we have urges, feelings. All that's very gross.

So interesting with then this being facial hair.

And then also, it's also a sign of virility. For someone who's undead, he sure has a pretty thick mustache.

That is weird. Yeah. Because it is said that parts of you still grow after death. Even so you hear your hair and.

Your fingernails, which he still has many.

Were, you know, this was a time of an emergence of psychological health. So we've got, you know, Freudian soon to come. And then we've got Darwin and all these other anthropological, biological scientists and researchers.

But then we go into this mode where people took advantage of that to then suppress other people, to scapegoat other people, to see, say that you are not as good as me. I am much better than you. Look at my facial hair. Does my facial hair tell you anything about who I am?

Which then brings about this monster and this creature being the superior to all of the rest of these people that are saying, no, wait, no, you can't do that. But you're. No, you can't be that being. You can't be better than me. You can't take over us all. And it almost.

It's kind of flipping people on their behinds in a sense where it's just like, who cares about your silly haircuts? And this is, you know, I am a disease that's going to eat you alive. Literally, I am eating you to death. What are you going to do about it?

I am beyond you. I'm a supernatural being. I have gone to the depths beyond what you think a hell is. And you have no idea what the name of where I have been.

Like, you don't have a say over what I do, but, oh, no, this little one does. This young female creature does all of a sudden. And then the light into the darkness, darkness into the light, and then vanished.

Both the female protagonists of Ellen and our creature, Count Orlok, all of a sudden vanish with their bond that gets created. And that starts out from when she's quite young, when she is a virgin herself. So you get this, like, weird, like it's.

It's not overtly religious at all. This is not what this discussion is about.

But there are these overtones because we're human, because we've lived in this Eastern, Western, you know, world of cultures. There are these elements that are in play in this entire story.

I mean, one of the things about vampires Is that, you know, they can't stand crucifixes or anything like that. But if you listen to Bill Hicks, I don't think Jesus Christ would like a crucifix either. If he. Yeah.

Bill Hicks, beloved late comedian, had mentioned that Christ would probably not want to see the thing that he died on all of the time. It's just like, what is that? Why are you wearing the thing that I died upon, like, all the time? I just thought that was funny.

You wore that today.

Well, it's just a very funny thing. But to then come to this point where in these kinds of stories and this film in particular, where you are bringing.

You're draining this idea of what it means to be beyond, to have an everlasting life. And beyond that, and it's like, well, what did you do? I'm the one that sat up in church all the day and. Yeah, Orlocks.

Well, I didn't and I'm here, so what do you want? You know, like.

But the only thing that can tame him as the shrew he becomes, the only thing that seems to be able to tame him is this idea of love and this light.

But onto another topic, just being the lighting that is in this film in and of itself, from the beginning, where we do see Ellen as a child when she's beckoning towards some angel, she actually thinks she does say an angel. I want an angel to come protect me and be with me and I want to love you and all this kind of stuff.

And when we see her in the nighttime saying this to a full moon, we don't see the light of. We don't see the moon at all. The moon is above the line of the screen. All we see is this weird light that's coming down.

It's like, where's that coming from? Which also gave me that theatrical stage lighting. I'm like, ooh, eggers at play here. I like it. Very nerd theater.

Oh, no, definitely.

I definitely read some things where he was talking about they specifically used certain color of lights, but also certain filters on the camera to achieve that. A very specific nighttime look. I almost wanted it to be completely desaturated, to almost have a black and white look.

But I feel like it's some of the best low light cinematography you're gonna find today. It's dark. I know that that's a big thing that cinematographers get a kick out of these days is like, how dark can they make it?

But you can still see with great definition. And it's done with a Sense of artistry. There's a reason that just as you're saying, you don't see where this light.

Is emanating from, you hear something. You keep hearing these whispers in a shadow. You can hear a shadow.

The abyss is out there.

Dude. What?

He's waiting.

But I had no idea about that, that he used a specific kind of filter. That darkness, by the way, it looks like a real midnight. It looks like that midnight blue that you see in the sky.

So he did a really good job at that. The cinematograph as well.

And it just being this off, this point of focus that is not in focus adds into that psychological, like, play of where is this voice coming from? And, I mean, you can hear it when you're in the theater or when you're watching it.

The way that that plays into you psychologically is like you hear something, it feels like it's behind you, but you're not seeing anything. Just like you said. That is taking. It's a strange misdirection, which he does a bit of in this film. Again with the timing issue.

There's like this misdirection of that.

If you don't know the story of Nosferatu, you think that Hutter is going to come and save his wife from death, from this eventual creature, that he's going to get there in time and then the creature's going to die and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this story is. The Nosferatu story is different from the Dracula story. In the Dracula story, Mina lives with Keanu Reeves.

Yeah, right, right.

Keanu Reeves. Yes, Keanu Reeves. All the time Keanu. But Harker, Jonathan Harker is. He ends up coming.

Well, actually, Mina saves herself, essentially because she kills the vampire and then she goes back to her husband and Harker's alive. In the Nosferatu version, Hutter is late again.

Or he might be on time, actually, I cannot remember the last, but I know that there's a pull on the clock.

Yeah, definite.

And I can't remember the last ticking, but I think it's made to be. The point of. It was like a callback to him being late in the beginning.

And I think he is on time in the end, but he's just not on time enough for her because she had to do what she had to do. But she was also, you know, she was full of some kind of sickness herself, I guess you could say. And she didn't see.

I thought maybe she didn't see herself pulling through in the way that she would want to Be this ever loving creature towards her own husband of Hutter. And that maybe that is this like weird Orlok being this older predator coming after a child from beyond, like as a shadow, as a whisperer.

And he's got the creeper mustache, which you know, of the time period of when he had died. That's what he died with. So we see that. But it's like, was Eggers, you know, was he alluding to the movement of like metoo?

Was he alluding to the industry, the film industry in and of itself? You've got Lily Depp, Rose, who is the daughter of Johnny Depp. And you've got these older players. You've got Willem Dafoe in there.

You've got, you know, people that have been on screen for a very long time. And then you've got a next generation from this older generation that has come in.

So it's just kind of like this weird, like there's a safety thing going on here where you've got Willem Dafoe's character who plays the scholar who comes to and he's got all this information on what Nosferatu is and this creature from beyond and has studied the supernatural and whatnot. So with that though, we kind of wonder. It's just like there is this kind of safety among other people here. But everybody keeps dying off around you.

So it's just like, is she finding comfort then in this creature? Does she become like kind of a Stockholm syndrome where it's just like adapt to.

Right. You see the side of your captors as being your side.

Right. I mean, in her beginning is beckoning to this creature in the first place and allowing this and allowing herself.

But at the same time it's like he's a creature though even our innocence, where there is a draw, so to speak, a drawing of the innocent blood. You're right, there is a lot of that too. We see children die in this film. You're right, which is different.

Again, a very modern horror thing. You actually see kids in heavy horror films, which is something you would never see.

There are heavy implications in many of the side characters, let alone our main characters in this story.

And again, all of it is definitely speaking towards our modern zeitgeist of gender dynamics, hierarchy, the sense of power struggles, how all of this means to the individual.

Yeah, because Ellen technically is hysterical is what it was called at the time, which is that word in and of itself alluding to our bodies, in our reproductive organs. And it is literally alluding to like being your own hormones. You hormonal and you're crazy.

And it's not just that she's, like, going through stuff because she maybe lost her mom as a child and had this weird mental thing that happened to her as a result. She had PTSD of her own. And maybe she's just dealing with a bunch. I don't know. She just got married.

She's, you know, she's got a lot she's got to deal with. She's trying to build a household and get plates. Decorative plates.

Yeah. I was trying to think of. Almost all the other characters are all like old men. Yep.

Or unless they're their husbands.

Right. But none of the men have any of the answers. Even our ancient occult scholar, it's not until the end that he realizes what the answer is.

And he didn't even provide it. She did.

That's again with that masculinity throughout the film, running through a whole thread of consistently asking about Hutter and when is he moving into another house or how their household is going, how he's getting a new job and a higher paid job and whatnot, and going out to these older gentlemen that he works for and still being like this, oh, yeah, I'm sorry I'm late today. Blah, blah, blah. You know, down to Orlok himself.

And coming to this, you said this ancient beyond creature who himself was old world versus new world. Kind of a sense of where. It's just. Maybe this is another play on an evolution in masculinity in of itself.

And that being an interesting story of Nosferatu, where it is this, like, this old world that has already died off and it's trying to relive again. And it's just like, no, dude, like, we're done. Like, you gotta go.

This weird notion that you have of this form of love, maybe even a genderized love, maybe we need to expand our ability to see the way that we can forever love another. Not going into her being a child, not staying away from that. That's not where I'm going with this.

But in the essence of that, in consensual adult relationships, being of that romantic value of, like, is my husband good enough for me?

You're not, you know, you're not mature enough or something, you know, and that's when she goes into, like, the plates and, like, she wants these things and they have their, like, first argument and it's. We see them as a newlywed couple and it's that, well, that's, you know, you. You guys are newlyweds. You're supposed to get into things.

You know, your two beings come together, and it's not just being husband and wife.

It's just you're another person to another person, and you're in another person's space, and there's this other creature that's trying to edge itself into both of your spaces. And, like, you're saying, like, this is a point where Hutter comes into his masculinity himself.

Right.

But it's not even being a man, necessarily. It's just like. No, it's my love for this other.

Person finding his own confidence. Right, yeah, exactly. Just a little too late.

Yeah.

And the thing with our creature, Count Orlok, you mentioned the search for love in one of the first episodes, and it's almost like he doesn't understand that he's a narcissistic creature. Everything is about him. So the point being made at the end, as you had mentioned, is that Ellen being the point of his end, that's the.

She's the only one that could end him. Because he himself only probably went into the dark arts because he was still searching for something. Sure.

He was still looking for that thing that he couldn't find while he was alive and while he was killing and blah, blah, blah, or whatever he was doing, looking for that one piece of thing, ironically, going so dark through hell, through the scapes of the dark arts, and into, like, other dimensions. And whatever he did to do and become what he becomes, this distant whisper that you don't see.

There's no light that shines upon him, typically until he dies in the light.

So him reaching through the darkness to only find the light, it's like, duh, the only side of you that you were looking for was this light, this creature of love and light.

The fact that you couldn't put that together, that this hysterical, crazy female is the only one in the end, which is the only pinnacle point for every single one of those characters.

Losing your light, losing your love, losing the children, even the fact that this comes out during the Christmas, during the darkest point of the year, and that it takes place in the film during the darkest point and darkest time, the shortest time of light for the northern hemisphere, at least that being an interesting detail where it's just like this dark creature's timing. It can stay out for as long as it needs to, except for these few hours without dying. The fact that, like, yeah, he also misses his timing.

That's a weird thing. Okay, let me bring it back here.

I do like the fact that Willem Dafoe and Johnny Depp, the Fact that those two Johnny Depp, one of his first films, was. Was with Willem Dafoe in Platoon.

Yeah, yeah.

So you have this other sense of beyond just the screenplay, this other sense of Hollywood in and of itself and the protagonist being a female and the sense that Hollywood wants more female protagonists to lead the way.

Interesting enough, when talking about this fear of emasculation, we have these parallel real life instances that are going on with the MeToo movement with Hollywood in and of itself and this like fear of emasculation within Hollywood. Like, no, I want to treat you the way I want to treat you. You can't get this part unless you do this thing because I'm a man or whatever.

And then with Lily Rose Depp being a progeny of an already established male lead, a male actor that we've seen in so many different films, we. So Lily Rose Depp at her young age working with her father's co worker and co player in a different film when they were that young age.

It's just very interesting to see like this older male that's just, you're safe even in the movie, the scary creature, this disgusting, gross male, like, gross, nasty. I'm gonna eat you alive creature with that background of Hollywood being this like, we're gonna eat ya.

You're gonna eat our young, we're gonna eat our star. And then you got like Willem Dafoe that's just like, hey, what's up? Like y' all safe with me.

And like, you know, he knows her father and worked with her father when he was young as well.

I just thought that was a very interesting thing and wondered if, because she is nude in the film, which is very interesting because it's almost like if I were Johnny Depp, I'd be like, who's touching my daughter and who's singer like on this film when we've already got problems going on in Hollywood. It would be one of those things where it's just like comfort level. You know, we've got therapists on stuff.

There's intimacy coordinators.

Yes, thank you. That handle certain aspects of where to stop. Where does it another actor feel comfortable where they do they not feel uncomfortable.

And we are going to have this conversation before we even read the script kind of a thing.

Yeah, definitely.

So to have those things now in modern day brings about this whole thing where it's just like with Ellen, played by Lily Rose Depp, how she herself as that character breaks down this notion of whether it is over masculinity or emasculation it's just, like, breaking down all of that crap and just being like, well, what I'm gonna do as this character is, yeah, I'm gonna do everything I want to do. I'm gonna feel comfortable doing it. And I'm also gonna, like, kill everybody.

And then I'm gonna let myself die in the arms of this disgusting beast creature. So what do you want? You know, it's just like, all right, I'm gonna die in the most beautiful way with this most disgusting, ew, ick kind of creature.

And then it's almost parallel to, like, this old guard, old world.

It's as if it was her destiny.

Interesting, right? This old world of maybe even Hollywood in of itself being killed off. It's like, we still love you, Hollywood, but we're gonna do something new.

We're moving on, and you're coming with us in a sense. But that stuff, that's gotta die.

The times, they are a changin'.

The disgusting old creature's gotta die. We're gonna kill you off. And we'll do it in this most beautiful way. Which is almost weird.

Cause it's like, oh, maybe I was just touching on that a little bit. There was tons of flowers. It was a beautiful funeral, I have to say.

It's early morning golden hour.

Yes.

Magic hour.

I know, right? Well, here we go. We're gonna go out into the cold pretty soon here. I'm sure we're gonna talk much more about monsters and whatnot we've got.

I mean, it is the season.

Tis the season, indeed. Watch out for those full moons out there. I'd say maybe just watch out for the ones with blood dripping off their.

Not so much the pencil mustache, but maybe just the blood drooping off the mustache in an oven itself. And probably a telltale song.

Right? That's a cue you should pay attention to.

Brendan, thank you so much for joining me.

Of course. Thanks for having me.

All right, I'll be back with more soon for other discussions. This is Ripper, and thanks for joining me as I'm Terry Denise. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to Ripper.

You can find more about this and other LCC Connect podcasts at lccconnect. Com.